Press council of India chief Markanday Katju is a marksman par excellence.  After relentlessly trying many targets, he seems to have hit through the right one.

In a signed article that appeared in The Hindu on February 15, Katju questioned Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi’s secular credentials and economic growth in his state and cautioned those clamouring for Modi as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate.

As expected, BJP leader Arun Jaitley jumped into the arena, dubbing Katju as “more Congress than the Congress”, adding that his attacks on non-Congress governments, whether in West Bengal, Bihar or Gujarat, seem more in the nature of “thanksgiving” to those who provided him with a post-retirement job. He demanded that Katju must resign from his post.

The PCI chief, a former supreme court judge, hit back at Jaitley, accusing him of twisting facts and asked him to quit politics. Katju said he had written “very strong” letters to Congress-ruled Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan over the arrest of two girls for a Facebook post after the death of Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray. He said he had also written to Congress leader Virbhadra Singh, now Himachal Pradesh chief minister, over his remarks to a cameraman during campaign ahead of last December’s state assembly polls.

Till reports last came in, many other senior leaders from both the BJP and the Congress —Digvijay Singh, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Rajiv Pratap Rudy, among others — had joined the ensuing war of words.

The man who now sits back in his armchair and relishes the ensuing repertoire of political mudslinging is a proud man — he has got it right after so long.

The man who speaks the unpleasant truth, bruyat satyam apriyam; the man who called journalists uneducated and 90 percent of Indians idiots; the man who compared Sunny Leone with Mary Magdalene, and called Salman Rushdie a substandard writer, could — even after all this — at best be in media headlines. Today, he is past that stage — he is at the centre of a raging political debate. 

That’s the true Katju.

While he is here and ticking, let us do a short parachuting of his earlier stints at supreme court and Allahabad high court.

When Katju’s term at the supreme court ended, an anonymous apex court lawyer wrote in an article on www.legallyindia.com, titled “The circus has left town”:

“Most senior advocates disapproved of this circus. Some expressed their disapproval in and out of court, others quietly refused to accept briefs which involved appearing in his court. Much of their criticism was entirely valid, but Katju did not believe in craving their approval by ceasing to be his usual, larger-than-life self… Katju’s unpredictability on the Bench manifests itself in a hugely contradictory judicial legacy left behind in his judgments.”

The article deals at length with his short temperament and unpredictable style of working.

In 2010, when Katju was a judge in the apex court, he wrote in an order that something was rotten in the Allahabad high court, of which he had earlier served as the chief justice. The judges in Allahabad were pained at his observation. So much so that the former justice of that high court Yatindra Singh, who retired recently, made a mention of it in his farewell speech and took a jibe at Katju also: “I now leave it for you to decide where it was and whose mind the rot was. Yet, they were unnecessarily heaped upon those who had nothing to do with it, ignoring our good points.”  

I have always said in my various previous articles necessitated by the verbal agility of this gentleman that Katju is here to stay. His present chair is too small to accommodate his bloated ambitious self. And he will go any length just to serve that ego.

A few pervious articles on Markanday Katju by this writer:

In the court of justice Katju

Latest from the Katju

Why I can’t pay tribute to Katju not paying tribute to Thackeray

Katju's newsroom adventures with gavel & other idiosyncrasies

Katju's intellectual monopoly and Allahabad Uni hangover

Gag order on media: In praise of Justice Katju, for a change

The 10%

Return of the angry young man